“This is something that’s been percolating around with a lot of people post-SOPA. What could we do to get more organized if another threat were on the horizon?” said Rainey Reitman, activism director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a member of the IDL’s steering committee.

The group, whose members include Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), Public Knowledge, Reddit, Mozilla and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, according to an IDL spokesperson, will launch July 19 with kick-off parties events in four cities, the real Gotham (New York), San Francisco, Washington and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia (where one IDL member resides).

The IDL describes itself as "thousands of websites, groups, and individuals who can immediately respond to threats to the Internet." It also plans to be a permanent coalition with a goal of mobilizing millions.

Corynne McSherry, Intellectual Property Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told TheDC that taking down the ad was both “ridiculous” and “dead clear on fair use.”

“Fair use” describes the section of federal copyright law that covers circumstances where it is legal to use small portions of copyrighted works without obtaining permission or paying royalties. Republishing a brief excerpt for the purpose of parody is one of those permissible uses.

McSherry told TheDC that material is removed from websites for improper reasons so often that her organization stopped blogging about every occurrence. Instead, EFF now has a “hall of shame” on its website.

“Improper takedowns happen all the time,” McSherry explained, ”and they happen because large copyright holders don’t do what they need to do under the law, which is to consider whether the use is actually authorized.”

She accused large content companies and other copyright holders of thinking only about whether they have licensed material they own — not about whether someone else’s actions constitute fair use under the law.

“You don’t need political motivation. You don’t actually need a conspiracy. It’s just going to happen anyway,” McSherry said. “To be honest, I almost find that more depressing. So much important political speech has been taken down because the copyright holder can’t be bothered to do anything else.”

The FAA is responsible for regulating this initiative, but according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), there's been very little progress on this front.

Leaving privacy concerns aside, unlike military drones civilian drones are highly vulnerable to breaches as well. Over the weekend at the HOPE 9 conference in New York City the EFF's Trevor Timms and Parker Higgins discussed just easy it is to hack into a civilian drones.

“This is something that’s been percolating around with a lot of people post-SOPA. What could we do to get more organized if another threat were on the horizon?” said Rainey Reitman, activism director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a member of the IDL’s steering committee.

Governments recognize that social networks store a great deal of information that could be useful to law enforcement, said Eva Galperin, a freedom of expression coordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Therefore, she noted, the companies are "extremely powerful" and are "capable of de facto censorship."

At least 18 police departments, universities and other government agencies have received clearance from the federal government to send up a range of unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, according to documents unearthed by a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"There is a little bit of gold in your phone," says Seth Schoen, a tech expert with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and he's not kidding about gold in phones. They can actually be melted down for precious metals, or recycled and re-sold. "You might think that your phone is so old and obsolete, but there is probably someone who still wants to buy it."

"A new campaign, using Blackshades Remote Controller, has been discovered via a message sent from a compromised Skype account to an individual working with the Syrian opposition, seen in the screenshot below. Roughly translated, the message reads: 'There is a person who hates you, and keeps talking about you. I took a screenshot of the conversation. Please beware of this person, as he knows you personally. This is a screenshot of the conversation,'" Eva Galperin and Morgan Marquis-Boire of the EFF wrote in an analysis of the attack.

If the victim clicks on the link that's embedded in the message, a ZIP file is downloaded to the victim's machine. Once unzipped, the file is installed on the PC and then it goes through a typical malware routine, looking for its parents and asking what it should do.

"This malware attempts to connect to the command and control server at: alosh66.servecounterstrike.com. While the DNS provider for this domain has been notified and the domain has been disabled, the last IP address that this domain resolved to was 31.9.48.11. The subdomain "alosh66" appeared in the command and control domains of the two other campaigns EFF has described above," Galperin and Marquis-Boire wrote.